scholarly journals Tricontinentalism before the Cold War? Mexico City’s anti-imperialist internationalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (48) ◽  
pp. 327-345
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Lindner
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
First World War ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Central Question ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First World

This article examines how anti-imperialist thought in Mexico City inspired internationalism in the 1920s. It uses the concept of “tricontinentalism” to refer to the idea that Latin America, Africa, and Asia should stand in solidarity with each other and argues that tricontinentalist thinking originated not in the Cold War, but in the aftermath of the First World War. The Mexican and the Russian Revolution had demonstrated that radical social change was imaginable. Together with the First World War, which for many in the Americas signaled the demise of European global hegemony, these revolutions represented a new era of political possibilities as well as a tectonic shift in global politics. Consequently, many anti-imperialists in Mexico looked to “the East”, drawing inspiration from the anticolonial revolutions in Africa and Asia. The central question of this article is how anti-imperialist political activists, intellectuals, and artists engaged in tricontinental thinking by writing about China and Morocco. The examined transnational interactions constitute a radical version of an imagined internationalism in the 1920s.

Neutrality/Nonalignment and the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Rakove
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First World

For almost a century and a half, successive American governments adopted a general policy of neutrality on the world stage, eschewing involvement in European conflicts and, after the Quasi War with France, alliances with European powers. Neutrality, enshrined as a core principle of American foreign relations by the outgoing President George Washington in 1796, remained such for more than a century. Finally, in the 20th century, the United States emerged as a world power and a belligerent in the two world wars and the Cold War. This article explores the modern conflict between traditional American attitudes toward neutrality and the global agenda embraced by successive U.S. governments, beginning with entry in the First World War. With the United States immersed in these titanic struggles, the traditional U.S. support for neutrality eroded considerably. During the First World War, the United States showed some sympathy for the predicaments of the remaining neutral powers. In the Second World War it applied considerable pressure to those states still trading with Germany. During the Cold War, the United States was sometimes impatient with the choices of states to remain uncommitted in the global struggle, while at times it showed understanding for neutrality and pursued constructive relations with neutral states. The wide varieties of neutrality in each of these conflicts complicated the choices of U.S. policy makers. Americans remained torn between memory of their own long history of neutrality and a capacity to understand its potential value, on one hand, and a predilection to approach conflicts as moral struggles, on the other.

The history of a lesson: Versailles, Munich and the social construction of the past

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First World

The article investigates the concept of lessons in IR. By means of a constructivist critique of the ‘lessons literature’, the article analyses one of the most important of IR lessons: that of Munich. Examining how the Munich lesson came about, the article shows the praxeological nature of lessons and emphasises the need to study the history of lessons rather than the lessons of history. This approach shows that Munich is the end point of a constitutive history that begins in the failure of the Versailles treaty to create a durable European order following the First World War. The Munich lesson is thus one element of the lesson of Versailles, which is a praxeology that defines how the West is to make peace, and against whom peace must be defended. The lesson of Versailles has been, at least in part, constitutive of the outbreak of the Cold War, and it continues to define the Western conception of what defines peace and security even in the ‘war against terrorism’.

Defending the Faith

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
Dynamic Effects ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First World

This volume explores how conflicts between secularist ideologies and religious faiths shaped global history in the twentieth century. The chapters approach the dynamic effects of these struggles by focussing on ‘apologetics’, i.e. the discourses, strategies and institutions deployed by religious and secularist actors on the front lines to articulate the faith and defend against the enemy. From the futurology of HG Wells to Cold War evangelicalism to the contentious negotiations over Islam between Communists and the royal house in 1970s Morocco, apologetics is here revealed to be a key site interaction across ideological boundaries. By bringing the dynamics of religious and secular apologetics into a comparative perspective, with examples drawn from Western Europe, the USSR, the USA, North Africa and Asia, the chapters offer new perspectives on the religious dimension of local and global religious politics between the First World War and the end of the Cold War.

Rose Macaulay and Propaganda

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-468
Author(s):  
James Purdon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
First World War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
National Information ◽  
Rose Macaulay ◽  
First World

The novelist Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) had direct professional experience of Britain's secret propaganda operation during the First World War. She was among the first British novelists to take propaganda seriously as a subject for fiction, and wrote insightfully about its methods and its social implications. Moreover, her long career illuminates both the continuity and the development of the British state's clandestine efforts to shape public opinion at home and abroad, from the beginnings of systematic, state-directed propaganda in the First World War to the more diffuse strategies of early Cold War anti-communism. Despite her close connections to propaganda in both world wars, however – and notwithstanding the interest her fiction very frequently takes in the worlds of official information, disinformation, and espionage – Macaulay has hardly figured in recent scholarship on the links between literature and national information systems. This article argues that Macaulay approached the challenge of reconciling propaganda and literature differently from many of her modernist contemporaries, refusing to abandon the idea of fiction as a persuasive and socially-engaged form of imaginative writing. If this position made her an outlier in the climate of reaction against propaganda which followed the First World War, it would, by the early years of the Cold War, seem much more tenable. In its first half, the article establishes Macaulay's bona fides as a participant in Britain's wartime propaganda establishment, and describes the impression this experience left on her early fiction. It then turns to Macaulay's final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, in which religious propaganda and anti-communist rhetoric combine, to great comic effect, in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War middle east.

Dadaism and Classicism in The Waste Land

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-292
Author(s):  
Patrick Eichholz
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Out of the wreckage of the First World War, classicism and dadaism charted two opposing paths forward. While one movement sought to overturn the institutions complicit in prolonging the war, the other sought to buttress these same institutions as a safeguard against the chaos of modern life. This essay studies the peculiar convergence of these contradictory movements in The Waste Land. The article provides a full account of Eliot’s postwar engagement with dadaism and classicism before examining the influence of each movement on The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory will be introduced in the end to address the article’s central question: How can any one poem be both classicist and dadaist at the same time?

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-111
Author(s):  
Tim Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First World

The war against fascism was transformed into the Cold War. U.S. imperialism, subdued somewhat by post-First World War isolationism, came into full flower. Washington implemented this sea change in many ways, including the division of the Korean Peninsula.

The Nationalization of the Masses

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick ◽  
Nicholas Doumanis
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Masses ◽  
First World

Europe was a continent of nation states by the mid-twentieth century. But it was not always thus. The patchwork quilt of nation states and the nationalism that coloured them in were forged by massive social and political shifts that had been gathering momentum since the late nineteenth century. Viewing nations and nationalism as constructs of modern, global capitalism, often legitimated by national mythologies old and new, this chapter surveys the forces at work: from above and below, from centre and periphery. The First World War raised nationalism to white heat, and as multi-ethnic empires faltered, myriad subaltern nationalisms erupted, demanding ‘self-determination’, the watchword of the post-war peace settlements. But the war also unleashed internationalist class challenges to belligerent nationalism, culminating in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Thereafter, European nationalism assumed its most truculent guise: fascism and military dictatorships warring against class in the name of ethnic, national, and biological purity.

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